This episode was actually pretty close to the original Kisaragi Attention (minus the circumstances surrounding Momo becoming an idol). Oh and I guess they added Hibiya in this episode too. Anyways, I’ll throw the original song in the post at the end since it doesn’t spoil anything.

Maybe you can already guess who the kid on the far right is.

Okay, this is pretty Monogatari-ish (it is the same director, I guess). I was expecting less dialogue. Though the character’s have mostly only been talking one on one so far, and we’re still in the more “mundane” stories of Mekakucity. I might have spoiled some character relations in the comments section for the first episode, since I was expecting them to have the next episode be Shintaro’s initiation into the Mekakushi Dan. …Instead we got a story of how Momo was discovered. Jumping around in a story is fine, as long as the random plots that they keep starting connect up at some point. Shintaro’s story was just kind of left hanging. Though maybe they’re doing this because it’s probably important to establish Momo now so they don’t have to backtrack when Shintaro joins. I’m pretty sure that Momo is already there by the time Shintaro joins. They can’t really go into the other member’s backstories either since they’re a bit more… plot heavy than this one is.

Momo doesn’t seem quite as clumsy as she seemed in the videos (maybe that’s coming later), but her bad luck with things still remains. …Or maybe some of that is her own fault considering how her grades are. She’s earnest though, and seems to try her best. If you didn’t pick up on it, Momo’s power is to focus attention. It works on herself or her creations (in this case, music and her artwork). Though this is a case of the power maybe not being such a good thing, since Momo’s life is more complicated with it. I wouldn’t say that Momo quite falls completely into a character stereotype (she’s a bit more… slow eccentric compared to the usual airhead), but she does come pretty close with a few things.

It makes sense that Momo would become an idol for paying her mother’s hospital bills or something, but they never specified her reason. She just kind of… did it. Though maybe this was a case of her wanting to do something for attention that actually deserved praise? Obviously her involvement with the art club was scarring for her. Maybe Momo really did deserve the praise she got and the other girl was saying those things out of jealousy. However, getting attention all the time actually may have lowered Momo’s self esteem instead of boosting it. Momo seemed to be stuck in the mindset that the things she was praised for were due to her power at work as opposed to her actual ability, so she might have become an idol to break out of that. …Somehow. Since with the “style” criticism in mind, she might have gone through the same thing as an idol. It’s just as easy to sing without “substance”. Though looking at the music industry, a lot of people get through without having “substance” just because they’re popular, so maybe Momo was okay. Popularity is something that Momo isn’t in danger of losing and from the insert, she does have talent singing, so perhaps becoming an idol was the best career choice for her after all.

So Shaft, it hurts.

Well, they didn’t have Fujita Saki in this as a seiyuu, but they seem to have acquired Lia for the ED (plus Jin again~), which is just as amazing. …Er, Lia provided the voice bank for the Vocaloid IA, who Jin uses the majority of the time. Long story short, this anime is doing a lot of callbacks to the original songs, which is pretty awesome. They had the actual titular song “Kisaragi Attention” in the episode too~. I’m not getting my hopes up for musical interludes in every episode (since that might take away from the mood of the story when things get more serious), but if they have them in here once in a while, that would be awesome. …I also finally noticed that some of the soundtrack seems to be different compositions of Jin’s music, which, like everything else, is a nice integration.

As promised, Kisaragi Attention (this is IA singing here)

Things are still coming along pretty well. Having them just suddenly cut out of Shintaro’s story and go straight into Momo’s was a bit jarring, but like I said above, as long as they connect the plots together somehow, things should turn out alright. The music inserts were good (can they put out a CD with all of the seiyuu covering the character songs? Please?), and the character interactions were pretty fun, so no complaints there either. I’m curious to see how they handle conversations with multiple people if they ever do that. Monogatari was one on one for the majority of the time, so that might be where Mekaku could break away from things. I’m sure they could manipulate the script so that it’s only one on one, but considering that the Mekakushi Dan has quite a few members, conversations with multiple people is kind of needed if they want to make the most out of character interactions.

15 Responses to “Mekakucity Actors – 02”

This episode was a lot of fun to me at least. I enjoyed how they added the back story elements to Momo’s story. I have not watched that many songs from this series, but it was really cool that they included the song into the actual episode.

I wonder when they are going to introduce the characters with very dark back stories and how they are going to handle the characters for them.

This one wasn’t quite as distracting, but I think I’ve figured out part of what I don’t like. The ‘visual interest’ that people keep mentioning, saying it keeps conversations from getting boring, to me just interferes with whatever the conversation is. I don’t remember the conversation, the words have no impact (and remember, I have this *same exact problem* with Shinobu in particular in Monogatari, she does far too much talking with distracting stuff going on in the video) and the information is lost in the noise of the “pretty” visuals.

Personally, I think there are plenty of ways to make conversations interesting, #1 being make it an interesting conversation. If it was anyone besides Shinbou, I might start thinking that maybe the conversations themselves are boring, and they’re trying to cover for that. But I think with these (and giving the material the benefit of the doubt), it’s more that Shinbou just has to do his schtick.

(for an alternative, I like a lot of the conversations that PA Works does: Red Data Girl had quite a few, and especially Akari’s conversation with her father in Nagi no Asukara)

There’s no way I can totally say skipping from one character to the next is jarring. The series has a total of 11 episodes so it makes sense if each cast member has one specifically designated to them. How the rest will be executed remains to be seen. If anything, the others can join in as cameos like the prior episode with those three hooded guys in the art above the comment section.

This is the backlash when watching a series that’s heavy on dialogue sometimes. Some conversations are so random and long that it’s not always easy trying to make sense of what’s going on, even when the story is happening right in front of you. I got the general idea of Momo becoming an idol as a means to support her mother since a career like that rakes in a lot of money for the successful, popularity being the main cog in the machine, but a considerable amount of thought is required to sort everything else out.

I didn’t really have any issues with jumping from one character to another. It seemed to be obvious that it was doing that very quickly, so I just took it as “setting up the rest of the show”. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had more character singles like this as well, and I wouldn’t mind. Momo was more interesting than watching Ene almost bully that guy whose name I can’t even remember from the first episode.

Actually, the manga was the same, they just skipped Shintarou for a while, to show what actually happened in the begining when Kano, Shintarou (Seto wasnt actually a hostage, it’s interesting why they decided to make him one xD) were hostages and crazy things started to happen.

I just love her this anime is going and I cant wait to see the other characters and how they are going to show them, it’ll surely get more interesting as it goes.